by Rachel Toliver
Now is the time to take imaginaries very seriously. Now is the time to realize that the imaginary wall invoked in a campaign could very well be the single defining feature of our national future.
Part One: Imaginary Maps
Ohio might seem like an imaginary place to you—a mystical land that appears every four years, when there’s a presidential election, and then disappears again. But I can assure you that Ohio does exist; I’ve been there, and in fact I own a house there.
My husband and I bought a house on the Southside of Columbus Ohio. We paid $28,000. Even in Ohio dollars, it was the house that you’d get for $28,000. To call it a fixer-upper was optimistic. The man who’d sold it to us had been an unrepentant slumlord. But we loved the neighborhood: its wide streets and grassy lots, the sunflowers heavy in the August heat.
A few days after closing on the house, I was talking to an acquaintance at a party.
“Where’s your new house?” the acquaintance asked. I told him the cross streets.
“Oh,” the acquaintance said. “We call it the death zone over there.”
There are plenty of things a person can say about someone else’s new house. I’ve heard that “congratulations” is customary. Maybe a polite “Oh, good for you.”
“You’re moving to the death zone” is… a bit less traditional.
And the person who feels good about saying you’re moving to the death zone also feels comfortable explaining in more detail why you’re moving to the death zone. “There’s nothing but police helicopters and stabbings on that side of Parsons,” he said.
I should explain. That zip code, 43206, is bisected by a street called Parsons Avenue. On one side of Parsons Avenue is a wealthy neighborhood called German Village.
Figure 1: Southside Map
In German Village there’s the smell of fine coffee, the smell of boxwood hedges. The historic brick homes have historic slate roofs. The alleyways are winding, cobblestoned. The yards aren’t yards, they’re landscaping.
The acquaintance, that guy from the party, lived in German Village.
Or, here’s another way of mapping German Village—we’ll call this an empirical method. According to the 2010 census:
German Village had 3,094 white residents.
It had 74 black residents.
Average income in German Village was $78,000.
The other side of Parsons Avenue is the neighborhood called the Southside, where my husband and I had just bought a house. There, in what the acquaintance had called the death zone, tribes of stray cats catch crickets. My neighbor Mike made too much salmon on his grill, so he brought a few pieces over to us, steaming on paper plates. Our other neighbor Scott said he’d look out for us, and he did. One day, in the house, I knocked a lamp over with my bike. I was running late and crying and yelling. Suddenly, Scott’s face was pressed against our window screen. “Are you OK?” he asked. Scott was clearly ready to fight the asshole in my house. Of course, the asshole in my house was me, sweating, sweeping up the mess, my glasses sliding down my nose.
On the Southside, morning glories throng fences. It’s the quietest place I’ve ever lived.
Aside from all that, this is what the census has to say about the Southside.
It had 1,829 white residents,
784 black residents,
and an average yearly income of $31,000.
I’m very interested in maps; in fact, my manuscript in progress, Here, was first called My Cartographies. The death zone seemed like a sort of map—an imaginary map, created by the acquaintance, who lived only a few blocks from where I lived. In fact, I learned, the acquaintance had hardly ever been across Parsons Avenue, to the place that he called the death zone. And why would he cross that street—when, as he said, there’s nothing but shootings and police helicopters, over there?
My point is this. One geographic space can be imagined as two quite opposite things. I see the acquaintance’s map, and I see my own. The census makes a third map. And I want to write about all those Southside maps at once, superimposed upon each other.
But what does all this have to do with that paradoxical term, Speculative Nonfiction?
In preparing to write this, I googled the words “speculative nonfiction,” in every possible combination, compulsively. And I was delighted to find a new online journal, actually called Speculative Nonfiction, which launched at last year’s NonfictioNOW conference. In the manifesto for the journal, founders Robin Hemley and Leila Philip write:
Must an essay, as a subset of nonfiction, entertain “thing-ness” or the empirical world at all? Or is the truth of an essay sometimes the speculative endeavor itself? A “Speculative Essay” concerns itself with the figurative over the literal, ambiguity over knowing, meditation over reportage. For some writers, in all manner of nonfiction subgenres… facts as such matter for the ways they open paths to speculation.
Maps and census stats are things that hold their thing-ness, in the empirical world. On the Southside, Parsons Avenue was a fact. It was a North-South artery, a relentless migraine of traffic. But the more I speculated about Parsons Avenue, the more blurry and porous it seemed. Was it really a boundary, or was it figurative? Was it a metaphor, paved and useful for keeping the death zone in its place? Without Parsons Avenue, how would quaint little German Village be contained? Parsons Avenue was real—its asphalt, its stilted trees. But was its meaning an imagined thing?
I became obsessed with the death zone. How, I wondered, does one neighborhood get imagined as a utopia, while another neighborhood, literally on the other side of a street, get imagined as a dystopia? To figure that out, I had to do some time traveling.
One of the tropes of time travel is “the branch in the road.” I’ll take that famous literary text, Back to the Future, as an example. In Back to the Future, Michael J. Fox, aka Marty McFly, is sent back to 1955. Marty’s branch in the road occurs when he saves his father from a car crash. Marty’s mother falls in love with him and suddenly—what the heck?—Marty is literally being erased from existence. Shenanigans ensue, and eventually Marty lands back in 1985, in full corporeal form. He’s only there for a moment, before he flashes to the far-off future year of 2015.
Back to the Future teaches us many things. But one of the things it teaches is that, from the perspective of the past, the present is the future.
So, in the history of the Southside, there are a few significant branches in the road—places where certain futures were pursued, where others were closed off. I’m sourcing here from Sheila Jasanoff, a professor of law and public policy at Harvard University. Jasanoff writes that “imagination… [unites] members of a social community in shared perceptions of futures that should or should not be realized.” The “futures that are realized”—those particular branches in the road—become known as public policy, or history, or “just the way it had to be.” But, Jasanoff argues, the branch that we see as “just the way it had to be” is actually just one of many possible futures, all of which are, in their own way, equally imaginary.
Here is the map that brought about one particular Southside future. It was created, in 1936, by the Homeowner’s Loan Corporation, a federal agency.
Figure 2: Redlining Map
It’s a map that was replicated across America, so you’ve probably seen something like this before. It’s commonly acknowledged, now, that these maps are a rendering of our national racist imagination—bounded and color coded, made tangible as public policy. If you lived in a yellow or red swath, your neighborhood was considered “declining for mortgage” or “highest risk for mortgage.” The US government wouldn’t back your loan, the banks would deny you. You couldn’t build equity or wealth. Your neighborhood would languish, and then the languishing would be blamed on your own moral turpitude.
No physical geography distinguished these red and yellow blocks from the areas that were coded green—for “most desirable for mortgage”—or blue—for “still desirable for mortgage.” There was nothing inherently risky about this land, no sinkholes or bad earth. And the “declining for mortgage” designation didn’t come from the houses themselves, from shoddy foundations or subpar mortar. In fact, those charming German Village houses, with their peaked slate roofs, were in a yellow block: declining for mortgage.
These neighborhoods were cut off from financial stability because of the people living there: African-American families, immigrants, and low-income white workers from Appalachian Ohio and Kentucky.
It’s easier to run a highway through a neighborhood that’s “highest risk for mortgage,” so in the early 60’s, the city ran a trench across the landscape, leveling houses to build highway 70. Those highways, along with governmental mortgage subsidies and tax breaks, motivated middle-class white residents to move farther east, to the city’s affluent edges, and eventually even farther out, to gated communities and deed-restricted suburbs.
In 1960, an imaginary called the German Village Society came into being. German Village was thought of as an enclave: all those cobblestones, all those alleyways, right there in the city. German Village was charming; it was historic and it was European.
But it wouldn’t be an enclave if there weren’t an eastern border. It was also around this time that Parsons Avenue became a feeder street for the highway. It had been a place for strolling and shopping, for seeing and being seen. But in the early 60’s it started to become what it is now: all oil-leak and auto-body shops, grey itch of exhaust. In other words: a perfect border.
I’d like to relocate from these Southside imaginaries for a moment, to situate my thinking in the larger literary context. I’ve sourced many of these ideas from the sociologist, educator, poet and cultural organizer, Eve L. Ewing. Ewing is an academic at the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration. And an acclaimed poet. And the force behind Marvel comics’ Ironheart. And the author of the nonfiction book/ethnography/manifesto Ghosts in the Schoolyard.
She also describes herself as a “black girl from space via Chicago.” Place is, to put it mildly, extremely important to Ewing. Her interests might seem divergent, but she says that everything she does is “really part of one big project: helping to dream, and build, a better version of what she calls her ‘beautiful, hideous, deeply flawed, lovely, violent, endearing maligned, beloved hometown’” of Chicago.
As a guest on the podcast VS, hosted by poets Franny Choi and Danez Smith, Ewing said:
I think poetry… is very instructive in imagining impossibilities and rendering them possible. The book I have coming out next year [Electric Arches] is kind of about that, is using poetry to imagine alternative timelines of history or alternative dimensions…
My unofficial tagline for the book is True Stories From the Past and Future. So a lot of the book is retelling versions of the past or telling versions of the future or the present as though they were true. Something I say all the time in readings is—before I read a poem I’ll be like, “this is a true story.” All my poems are true stories. And then I’ll read something that is like demonstrably not quote unquote true. But to me it is, right, or it becomes so in the telling.
Now, there are two things I want to be explicit about. The first is this. Almost all of the writers I’m referring to are people of color. This is not a coincidence.
For people of color and Native people living in America, in the year 2019, and in all the years before this, speculation is not just a cool idea. This is true also for queer people and disabled people, as well as other oppressed people. Despair is real. Existential and bodily threats are real. The act of envisioning alternative pasts, presents and futures is literally a way, for some people, of seeing a way forward, and therefore—I am not being hyperbolic—of staying alive. (I’m drawing here from the literary/cultural/aesthetic movement of Afrofuturism, and from ways that Ewing and others have characterized this movement.)
There are white writers engaging in the work of “retelling versions of the past or telling versions of the future.” However, since my own manuscript focuses on landscapes of race and class, I tend to read the writers who are confronting those issues. As a white woman, I think of my own work as marginal to, and maybe overlapping with, but not situated within, the speculative work done by some of the writers I will name.
And I’d like to name, here, three other writers whose work has informed my thoughts.
Carmen Maria Machado is a queer, Latinx writer. Her forthcoming memoir, In the Dream House, uses elements of genre fiction to, as she says in an interview, “engage with and unpack a narrative of abuse.” Machado says that in this memoir she uses genre tropes—the gothic, erotica, Sci-Fi—as extended metaphors, and as a “way in” to difficult autobiographical subject matter.
In her book Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir, Susanne Antonetta creates porous spaces that contain physicality, and lines of heredity, and contaminated New Jersey landscapes. Of her grandfather from Barbados, she writes “because we watched him draw his world out of chaos, or his children did, they learned his physics—creation through erasure, landscape of litter and syncope, where solid things could… disappear.” Writing about her experience of being bipolar, Antonetta superimposes synapses on bogs and rivulets. And of speculative nonfiction, Antonetta says “We are constantly inserting ourselves into our landscapes, imagining what our presence means to what in our lives is cradling but inarticulate.”
Elissa Washuta is a member of the Cowlitz tribe. Most of our seen world has been colonized, Washuta says, so the act of writing into the unseen world is an anti-colonial act. Washuta has also characterized the speculative as a way of righting historical wrongs, pushing against colonial narratives. Knowledge is not always empirical—especially when empiricism has been weaponized by the colonizer.
This brings me to the second point I want to make explicit about speculative nonfiction: without deep research, deep speculation isn’t possible. In order to speculate about what didn’t happen, one has to know a lot about what did. All of these writers are dedicated researchers. The Colombian writer Lina Ferreira, whose work draws on mythology and cosmic speculation, once said she reads an average of one book for every paragraph she writes. Elissa Washuta’s fantastic essay “White City” is a comprehensive, multi-layered account of Seattle’s topography—rhetorical, geographic, emotional, spiritual, historical. In this essay, an unnamed water monster and Washuta’s own doppleganger are no less real than the landscapes of Lake Washington and Madison Park Beach. Speculative nonfiction is not just a flight of fancy. It’s months, or years, in library stacks and archives, in obscure books and on the internet.
And you have no idea how long I spent scouring digital photos, looking for pictures of Parsons Avenue soda fountains, trying to uncover all the proposed routes for Highway 70, Googling things like “highway Southside Columbus Ohio total destruction.”
Every node of research has its branches of speculation. When I look at this map, I think—what if red meant not “highest risk for mortgage” but “reparation zone”? What if yellow meant “put the best schools here”? And what if the portion of the $48-million bond package that in 1956 was dedicated to Columbus expressways had instead been used to upgrade the Livingston Avenue trolley line—to make it, in perpetuity, the most beautiful and efficient trolley corridor in all of America? What if cars had been banned from Parsons Avenue; what if Parsons had been made into a greenway? What if Schottenstein’s department store still stood on Parsons; how many people would have jobs there?
And if it seems like my speculation is idle, consider this: back in 1956, an author in Commentary magazine argued
It is really not Utopian to expect that minorities will increasingly be given fair access to improved housing on a large scale, and will moreover be accorded a certain amount of preferential treatment to compensate for past inequalities.
Sixty years ago, this author was certain that the future would hold a correction of housing inequality. In a speculative space, that branch in the road can exist somewhere, even if it’s a future that our country chose not to actualize.
In this speculative version of the Southside, these parallel imaginaries can share space with the imaginaries that came to fruition—those particular imaginaries that became fact, and those facts that looked like utopias for some people, but like dystopias for others.
Part Two: Future Museums
When I was growing up in 1990s Philadelphia, some kids in my neighborhood would yell “white girl” at me from their porches. I lived in an old stone house surrounded by yew trees. I also lived in a mostly African-American community. Walking from the H bus, I slunk my neck into my collar, pushed my hands into my pockets. I wore floppy hats with bulbous felt flowers—partially to hide under, partially—I hate to admit this—because I found them fashionable.
What would’ve happened if, instead of hunching and scuttling, I’d looked up and waved? What if my neighbors were calling me “white girl” in order to say hello? After all, they didn’t know my name—just as I didn’t know their names. I went to a private Quaker school, Greene Street Friends. Most of the kids in my neighborhood went to the public school, Pickett. We spent our days apart, and I spent my afternoons trying to get into the house before someone called me “white girl.”
For many years, I carried that name—white girl—with me. It was the world’s tiniest complaint, inked on the world’s tiniest slip of paper. White girl, as a container, held so many things for me. It was my street cred, when I was in college drinking beers with white people who’d grown up in suburbs. Sometimes the white girl anecdote was a prelude to whatever I had to say—“about race.” It wasn’t because I saw myself as a victim of reverse racism, but it was maybe, at times, part of an “all lives matter” type of conversation. It never occurred to me, the way that phrase had echoed through my life. “White girl” was also the poetry prizes I’d won, because my work addressed “universal themes.” It was the time I was “the right sort of person” for an internship. It was the private liberal arts college I went to, the teaching jobs I’d been hired for, right there on the spot.
I thought back to that, to being called white girl on my block, when I read these words from James Baldwin:
Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.
I’d read Baldwin’s fiction early, but came to his essays late. I was 35; after years of working as a public-school teacher, I’d gone back to school for my MFA. Reading Baldwin, everything shifted. I’d been called white girl on the street, I’d lived in diverse communities all my life, I’d taught in a Philadelphia high school that had literally been named the most diverse high school in America. But it took me a long time to really learn that whiteness wasn’t a natural state, that whiteness wasn’t the default. It had never occurred to me that whiteness could be looked at, as an object. I’d always thought it was whiteness doing the looking.
And everything shifted again in November of 2016, when I was sitting in an Ohio bar, watching the map change: grey to pink to red, it was really happening, and then Van Jones said This was a white lash. Toni Morrison reminded the nation, shortly after the election, that
Unlike any nation in Europe, the United States holds whiteness as the unifying force. Here, for many people, the definition of “Americanness” is color.
Her words, for me, reframed the phrase “identity politics.” The identity politics that define our country, that had—at least in part—driven the election, are the identity politics of whiteness.
But: how to write about it? I thought of Zora Neale Hurston’s famous line: “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.” But: how to write about that background? How to write about a white girl, standing in front of it?
These questions resulted in my essay “The Whiteness Museum.” This essay speculates: in a post-whiteness world, how would we look back on the idea of whiteness? Let’s say that, in this speculative world, there are still white people. But the idea of whiteness is a thing of the past. Gone are the network of associations that have built up around it, the things whiteness has animated and the things that have animated it.
Remember, this is a speculative world. Anything is possible.
So… What’s in the Whiteness Museum? Here’s one description of the museum itself:
Maybe there’s nothing in the museum. The museum encloses emptiness: emptiness, invisible and filling everything. People—by this I mean white people—protest the museum of whiteness. This isn’t what we thought it would be, they say. They walk through those empty rooms. Where are all the displays? Where are the glorious suits of armor? The illuminated manuscripts? The maps? The emptiness is a sort of agoraphobia. The walls fall away. In the museum of whiteness there’s no gravity; the floor gets confused with the ceiling. A white person, in those empty rooms, is a mote of dust, floating.
That’s just one view of the whiteness museum, though. The essay is written in sections, taking the reader on a tour of the museum. Each section functions like a room. And so—I’ll give you the abbreviated tour—the whiteness museum contains the following:
A rest stop in Sidling Hills PA, shortly after the 2016 election.
Movies about plucky white teachers, who teach “city kids”—black and brown kids—the importance of respecting themselves.
Summer camp, where my cabin divided along race lines and, despite where I’d come from, I joined the white girls.
The term “Becky.”
A discussion—in an entirely white writing workshop—about the future of art in the age of Trump.
To leave the speculative space of the Whiteness Museum for a moment: I mentioned before that everything shifted for me, reading James Baldwin, and that everything shifted a second time after the election. Everything shifted a third time at a panel I attended in 2018—a panel that was dedicated, actually, to speculative nonfiction.
The nonfiction writer Kiese Laymon began his portion of the panel speaking of Baldwin’s prophetic vision: Baldwin’s speculative revelation, his warning about the “fire next time.” The room was packed; I was sitting on the floor, nodding emphatically. I’d admired Laymon for many years, and was thrilled to hear him speak—about Baldwin, no less! Laymon paused for a moment. Then he said—I’m quoting approximately, relying on notes—that Baldwin was writing toward an audience of “conscious white folks”—the conscious white folks who find the suffering of black folks titillating. (With the phrase “conscious white folks,” I slunk a little lower toward the carpet.) Laymon said that in his own work—particularly his most recent book, Heavy—he wanted to write toward a particular vulnerable Southern black reader. He was writing Heavy, specifically, to his mother. And I have to note that this project, in itself, feels like an act of speculation. Laymon, in that talk, said that conscious white people are the engines of the publishing industry; black communities did not control the material conditions of his book’s production and reception. And yet: in the process of writing, he wrote as if he could write a book where his mother—and by extension Southern black families and black communities—could be the only audience.
In a Paris Review interview, Laymon says that, for black writers, centering whiteness
makes us ignore the contours of our own imagination and our experiences. And I understand—it’s America. Everything is a big gumbo. But for me, I think it makes it harder for us to imagine because we’re literally told that if we imagine out of the box, white people are going to get us. (Emphasis mine.)
This is what I want to imagine: a world where the work of writing about, and interrogating, whiteness falls on white writers. Which brings me to this: there’s one more exhibit in the whiteness museum, one that I didn’t mention. In the essay, I write:
You’ll find me in my particular enclosure. I am thinking—thinking really hard. You can watch me; I’m staring in the one-way mirror. I grew up in a black neighborhood. Maybe that’s on my display label: This One Says I Grew Up In A Black Neighborhood. Circa 1980; circa 2003; circa 2018. Watch me watching myself in that mirror. Watch as I examine a pimple on my chin. Watch me scratch it. Watch me try to rub away the blood.
This essay would not work if an abstraction of “whiteness” were its sole focus, the only object of study in the figurative museum. So, throughout the essay, I turn the gaze back to myself, the ways I’ve participated in whiteness, the ways I’m complicit.
Laymon speaks about being trapped in a box—a box where he ignores the contours of his own imagination, his own experiences. What if, instead of writing about “race,” white writers looked at the box itself? What if we speculated about how that box was constructed—and how it can be deconstructed?
Part Three: Alternative Facts, or, Shifting Borders
In 2016—during what we were then naively calling an ugly election season—I traveled, on my MFA program’s dime, to the verdant East Coast woods for a summer writer’s conference. The person running my workshop was not a literary nonfiction writer. He was a journalist and curmudgeon and contrarian, and he mixed a stiff drink that he named after himself, but which in actuality was just vodka-soda. He and I got along surprisingly well, considering he thought that writers “like me” were responsible for the rise of Trump. His was the roughest workshop critique I’ve ever endured. Subjective retelling, lyric language, non-fact-checkable claims and the phrase “I don’t know” were all anathema to him. In 2015, Kellyanne Conway had not yet invoked the now-infamous “alternative facts.” I’m sure if this teacher were to hear “speculative nonfiction,” he’d lambast the phrase for being complicit with the Trumpian “death of truth.”
So, is it? In response, I have four quick points.
First, speculative nonfiction is not speculative journalism. It’s not Alex Jones, whose campaign of anti-facts is now being spun as “performance art.” It’s not the pundits, on the right but also on the left, whose hot takes are now being marketed as the evening news. I don’t claim to be a journalist, and no one would read my nonfiction as if it were journalism. Most of the writers that I’d place in the tradition of speculative nonfiction deploy very clear signaling devices when they’re moving into the realm of speculation. Susanne Antonetta says: “unanchored speculation that the reader can’t see in terms of that speculative movement gets into the area of cross-genre or hybrid work, incorporating fiction.” A writer needs to be transparent with their reader—this is a speculative world, and this is how I made it. That transparency is not evident in the alternative facts that we see coming out of the media. And it’s certainly not evident in the alternative facts that we see coming out of the White House, where falsifications are side-stepped or met with partisan defensiveness.
Second, speculative nonfiction is not ahistorical. In his book Nobody Hates Trump More Than Trump, David Shields quotes Jeet Heer as saying that, in contemporary America,
The visual has triumphed over the literary, fragmented sound bites have replaced linear thinking, nostalgia has replaced historical consciousness, simulacra are indistinguishable from reality, an aesthetic of pastiche and kitsch has replaced modernism’s striving for purity, and a shared culture of vulgarity papers over intensifying class disparities. In virtually every detail, Trump seems like the perfect manifestation of postmodernism.
And at first glance, speculative nonfiction might seem to fit into the frivolous circus of our current age, as it’s described by Heer. But think back to the redlining map, all the imaginaries that could have been implemented, as opposed to the racist and classist imaginary that was implemented. This act, of looking at the entire network of historical imaginaries, is actually a broadening of historical narratives. It doesn't allow space for nostalgia to replace historical consciousness; instead, in its reinvention of the past, speculation is the antithesis of nostalgia. Speculative nonfiction is also the opposite of the fragmentation that Heer invokes; if anything, it’s a move toward hyper-connection. It might not be a linear model, but it builds on linearity; it is, in a way, hyper-linear.
Third, I think it’s more important than ever to realize what Sheila Jasanoff describes as the power of imaginaries to make policy. Jasanoff says:
It often falls to legislatures, courts, the media, or other institutions of power to elevate some imagined futures above others, according them a dominant position for policy purposes. Imaginaries… encode… visions of… how life ought, or ought not, to be lived; in this respect they express a society’s shared understandings of good and evil.
I’ve never written anything about Trump’s wall; I don’t even know how I’d start to write about Trump’s wall. It feels too insidiously smooth. As it has no logic, it has no logical holes. It is a hermetic thing, of one piece with imaginary ideas: about race, about safety, about nation. The wall is an expression of, as Jasanoff puts it, our “society’s shared understandings of good and evil.” But to call something an imaginary is not to deny its power. We live in a time when ideas about the Other—ideas about crime and who is criminal—are writing our national policy. Of course, it’s imperative to push back against these imaginaries with facts. Immigrants, both documented and undocumented, commit fewer crimes than American-born people. But it’s becoming more and more evident that the facts of one “camp” won’t change the minds of the other “camp,” especially as greater chasms are growing between our various camps’ sources of knowledge. Jasanoff writes that imaginaries, in addition to expressing ideas about good and evil, “encode visions of how life ought and ought not to be lived.” Speculative representations of the wall could serve to draw readers’ attention to all the ideas that prop up the wall—these ideas about good and evil, about how we might live in this American age. What if, instead of making the wall invisible, we render it more concrete—so that its exact shape and makeup and foundation are evident? It’s easy to call the wall ridiculous, a made-up solution for a manufactured problem. But I think, actually, we should be doing the opposite. Now is the time to take imaginaries very seriously. Now is the time to realize that the imaginary wall invoked in a campaign could very well be the single defining feature of our national future.
Fourth, speculation is a capacious space, one that opens up access to prosperity. I say this with an immediate caveat. There is no space where, for example, racism and anti-racism can co-exist. But it’s possible, I think, to imagine futures where one group’s utopia does not necessarily have to be another group’s dystopia. I am thinking in particular of the idea that the status of poor white Americans is threatened by people of color and immigrants, rather than being threatened by the wealthy. This is a persistent and pernicious American imaginary. Known as the “racial bribe,” Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, describes the inception of this imaginary: “Deliberately and strategically, the planter class [the upper class of colonial America] extended special privileges to poor whites in an effort to drive a wedge between them and black slaves.” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., that great practitioner of radical speculation, was dreaming in the years before his assassination of a “Poor People’s Movement.” Again, in Alexander’s words, Dr. King, shortly before his death, “envisioned bringing to Washington D.C., thousands of the nation’s disadvantaged blacks, Appalachian whites, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Native Americans to demand jobs and income—the right to live.”
And I’ll end with this. I’d mentioned, before, the amazing podcast VS. Its hosts, Franny Choi and Danez Smith, are poets who are working in the speculative tradition that I’d mentioned before. They’re both people of color, and like Eve Ewing they are trying to imagine alternative Americas—Americas where they can not only survive, but thrive. Two years after Choi and Smith interviewed Eve Ewing, Choi and Smith held their first retrospective episode, called RE-VS. In that episode they did their own time-travel, reflecting on the past two years. It happened that the original episode—the one Choi and Smith were thinking back to—was recorded merely weeks after the 2016 election. So in the 2018 RE-VS episode, Choi and Smith were thinking back to their 2016 crisis state, and reevaluating the election from a fresh perspective. If you don’t know Danez Smith’s work—and I’m focusing on Smith here because I’ll be quoting them—their most recent book is Don’t Call Us Dead, which was a National Book Award finalist. Smith is queer and black and HIV-positive. So—and they mention this in the episode—some of their despair at the 2016 election was because, quite literally, changes made to the Affordable Care Act could potentially kill them. Keep that in mind as I read what Smith has to say about speculation and empathy:
Poetry helps me extend empathy toward my enemies… The apocalypse we’re talking about is a conservative apocalypse, this huge, right-wing swing. And it makes me have to be considerate for these people that I want to beat up…
What about speculative nonfiction? what about speculative confessional? Imagining not our worlds with these things tinkered with but really just imagining ourselves… It’s being speculative about—how can I move through the world? It’s reimagining the magical ways in which I can care. And being patient with the feelings of this person that I consider my enemy. Are we enemies? What is our common wound? What made us make different decisions off of that?...
How can I imagine my enemy in my utopia? Is that possible? I want it to be possible. I want to think that there is room in utopia for the people that currently make a dystopic world for myself and the people that I love.
To be absolutely clear, I do not advocate in any way that the oppressed should be required to empathize with their oppressors. This is one poet, speaking only for their own lived experience. But the fact that Danez Smith was able to even entertain the idea of “extending empathy toward [their] oppressors” was revelatory for me. I paused in the midst of whatever chore I was doing, struck by Smith’s words.
Because the truth is: I’m someone who has way less to lose from the Trump administration, and it’s difficult for me to imagine empathizing with those I consider the enemy. Smith is a person whose life is literally at stake right now. And listening to their thoughts, more than anything, made me wonder about the borders I’ve constructed. These are interior borders, barriers to what Smith calls “the magical ways in which I can care.” And really I’d like to think that those interior borders can move. That they can shift outward, making more room, containing more space, and then—even more, and even more.
This essay was adapted from a lecture given at Hugo House in Seattle, Washington, May 2019.
Works Cited
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Rachel Toliver’s fiction, nonfiction and craft essays have appeared in Mid-American Review, Prairie Schooner, Creative Nonfiction, West Branch, TriQuarterly, Puerto Del Sol, The New Republic, and Brevity. Her short story, “Legion,” was the winner of American Literary Review’s 2017 fiction contest, and her essay, “My Cartographies,” was a Best American Essays 2018 Notable Essay. A winner of the 2017 AWP Intro Journals Project, she holds an MFA in nonfiction from Ohio State University.